to look out. But only Ya-tol Grysh and his immediate attendants, from their high perch, could see the cause of that horn.
A second contingent of soldiers - a second twenty-square! - stood on the field beyond Dharyan's fortified gate, led by a second Chezhou-Lei warrior in his fine, overlapping armor.
A second twenty-square! Chezru Chieftain Yakim Douan had sent eight hundred warriors to Grysh's call?
It took all the discipline the Yatol could muster to hide his shock. Eight hundred soldiers! That was more than a quarter of Jacintha's standing garrison!
"Yatol," Carwan Pestle breathed. ?Are we to conquer To-gai all over again?"
Yatol Grysh snapped a cold look over the Shepherd, who lowered his eyes. In truth, though, Grysh couldn't rightly disagree with his companion's assessment, and understood that Pestle had blurted the words without thinking.
Perfectly excusable, Grysh realized, given the enormity of the surprise before them. Two twenty-squares!
As exciting as that prospect might be. For if these soldiers had come in to serve Grysh and not merely as an extension of Chezru Douan's strong arm, then the Yatol of Dharyan had just become the second most powerful man south of the Belt-and-Buckle Mountains. Perhaps this was Chezru Douan's way of showing complete confidence in Grysh, then, in so empowering him before the time of Transcendence.
Too many possibilities, too many questions, assaulted the surprised Yatol at that time, and so he took a deep breath, consciously forcing himself to re-lax, reminding himself that he had yet to meet with the Chezhou-Lei lead-ers of the twenty-squares to determine so many things.
Other questions invariably came to him, though. Suddenly, he had eight hundred new mouths to feed, and eight hundred new bodies to shelter, and with the fierce Dharyan winter already beginning to blow. It was a daunting prospect, to be sure, but Grysh knew that he could handle it.
He signaled to his gate guards to allow the latest arrivals on the field en-try to Dharyan, and with the great curving teeyodel horns blowing, the city gates swung wide. So began the second procession of the morning, as disci-plined and perfect in formation as had been the first, marching past the ob-serving Yatol in eighty rows of five, and then assembling on the wide square beside the first group, opposite Wan Atenn and Grysh's relatively minor forces.
the second group was settling into place, Grysh felt the distant tare of Wan Atenn upon him. He looked down, studying his war leader, nd he knew that the Chezhou-Lei warrior was troubled by this unexpected rrival. They had only asked for sixty-four men, after all, and had been sent eight hundred!
Yatol Grysh offered a reassuring nod to Wan Atenn, sincerely given. The Yatol had no idea what Chezru Douan might be thinking, but he was fairly confident that the God-Voice didn't mean to usurp Grysh s power in the re-gion. Given that, Wan Atenn's position as military leader remained secure, because Grysh trusted the Chezhou-Lei warrior implicitly.
The Yatol went through the remainder of the ceremony with an air of disconnect, looking over the procession dispassionately and from a great distance. His thoughts were on the meeting that would soon follow, and al-ready he was formulating some ways in which he might make the best use of the new arrivals.
There was a particularly thorny renegade To-gai-ru that Grysh wanted to be rid of, one who was said to kill without mercy.
"Jilseponie Wyndon," said Chezru Douan, and he was shaking his head as he spoke the name. ?Who is this woman, to become a bishop in the Church ruled by men?"
Across from Douan's desk, Merwan Ma held his tongue, for he knew the question to be much deeper than the obvious answer - an answer that both he and Chezru Douan knew well enough.
Jilseponie had been the one to deliver the miracle of Avelyn a decade be-fore, rescuing Honce-the-Bear from the grip of the rosy plague. The com-panion of the dead Nightbird, Jilseponie was also credited, in part, with destroying the demon dactyl Bestesbulzibar and in helping to win Honce-the-Bear's war against the demon's goblin, giant, and powrie minions. But that was all long ago, and Jilseponie Wyndon was not a name that Yakim Douan and Merwan Ma had heard in several years.
Until this day, when Abbot Olin's messenger had delivered a note, obvi-ously written to convey a sense of distress, that Jilseponie Wyndon had been appointed bishop of the city of Palmaris, and more pointedly, that the woman was being openly courted by King Danube Brock Ursal.